


Metaphorical Crowbars

by thehobblefootalchemist



Series: Like Calligraphy on Scrap Paper [6]
Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: (after the requisite amount of irritation), -slaps au- this baby can fit so many headcanons, Bertrand ends up being more helpful than anyone (including himself) would have ever expected, F/M, The Calligraphy-verse is an ace-friendly verse, Writer is angsting over a facet of his relationship and seeks assistance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 12:43:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thehobblefootalchemist/pseuds/thehobblefootalchemist
Summary: “And just what are you after?” he accused once the silent staredown had extended nearly a minute.  “Don’t try and put any blame on us,shecame of her own free will.”The Ghostwriter sighed.  “I know.  She always does.”  The bespectacled gaze looked down a minute, then back up.  “I’m actually here to talk to you.”--Bertrand's day is always upheaved when Jazz Fenton shows up for another 'academic discussion' (to be read as: shouting match) with Penelope, but he makes valiant and mostly-successful efforts to rein himself in on these kinds of afternoons.  It's when he's approached by the Ghostwriter, known significant other of the very same Jasmine, that things really become just too much.
Relationships: Ghost Writer/Jazz Fenton, Penelope Spectra/Bertrand
Series: Like Calligraphy on Scrap Paper [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/728904
Kudos: 6





	Metaphorical Crowbars

**Author's Note:**

> Me speculating what situation could possibly get my two favorite DP ships to interact with one another became over 4k somehow. I just love writing Bertrand, man.
> 
> Spectra/Bertrand headcanons are heavily connected to my fics Marvelous and Old Words, which take place in the same verse as these Calligraphy stories; Penelope's mentioned sister and Writer's name are ideas I lifted from my friend Pseudinymous.

Bertrand was…he wasn’t sure what he was, but it wasn’t happy. Not only was he going to be subject to Penelope’s seething over her current confrontation with the Fenton girl (the latest in a long line, ever since she had first crashed their new office several years prior), the Fenton girl’s significant other was floating in front of him with a determined look on his face. Bertrand had hitherto been sitting idle in his human guise in the woods outside of town as he waited for the women to burn their argumentativeness out but he was rather leaning towards becoming something with claws—he didn’t like the set of the other ghost’s jaw.

“And just what are you after?” he accused once the silent staredown had extended nearly a minute. “Don’t try and put any blame on us, _she_ came of her own free will.”

The Ghostwriter sighed. “I know. She always does.” The bespectacled gaze looked down a minute, then back up. “I’m actually here to talk to you.”

His brow arched. Committing to changing shape, he took his favored panther form as he stood up upon the spur of rock he’d chosen as a place of rest (_so much for that_) and surreptitiously scented out the man’s aura. There was the wariness he expected, but something underneath, too, something unidentifiable but clearly churning. Bertrand’s now-red gaze narrowed.

He’d been entirely unsure what to think when the purple-clad ghost had come gliding up to him through the trees and that feeling, along with his irritation, only deepened with the man’s claim. Everyone who knew of the Ghostwriter’s existence knew he wasn’t the type for a solitary nature-walk, but to hear that he’d come here specifically to find _him_?

“Such a statement obviously begs the question of why,” he replied stiffly. It was difficult not to display raised hackles in the face of a reality-warping entity. Worse, a _writer_. Bertrand had little love for the idea of ending up in a story, literally _or_ figuratively.

“You’re…not like other ghosts.”

That wasn’t a good start to the conversation, and he told him so by way of peeling back his muzzle to expose several teeth.

The Ghostwriter quickly waved a hand. “I don’t mean the shapeshifting or the—vampirism, or whatever it is.” _Though those are certainly topics in their own right,_ his tone said without saying. “I’m here about something much more simple.”

Bertrand’s tail flicked. “You’re still not endearing yourself to me, coatrack.”

Eyes rolled behind their glasses, along with a mutter of, “Always the insults with you two.” Louder, he said, “You’re a natural ghost.”

“…and upon having this revelation, you were just _overcome_ with the need to find me in the woods.”

“Well you’re hardly ever away from Penelope, I had to take what venue I could get.”

The coatrack made a fair point. He was also allowing something like a distant cousin to desperation to color his aura, which was intriguing enough to dampen some of Bertrand’s combativeness. What oh what could be tying the Ghostwriter into such knots that he would seek out a conversation with someone for whom he held distaste?

It was an interesting enough little puzzle that he decided to engage with it.

Slipping down from his perch, Bertrand began to circle the other ghost in a leisurely prowl. “So you’ve run yourself into a question that all the little books in your precious library can’t help you with.” He contemplated what could be so specific that it had to be he himself that the writer talked to. “I’ll assume that this somehow has something to do with the girl, because after all the first time she came looking for us it turned out to be about _you_, so…”

“You’re not wrong.” The Ghostwriter clearly didn’t like Bertrand’s walking around him, but wasn’t projecting any abject fear. He either was too concerned with his internal conflict or knew that his own powers far outweighed what even the most determined cat’s claws could do—neither of which was friendly towards said cat’s self-esteem.

“So just to be clear, then,” Bertrand said as he made another pass behind him, “none of…whatever this is, is going to be ending up in any research notes?”

The shock of surprise that lit up his expression was proved by his aura to be absolutely genuine. “No! No, that wasn’t—I didn’t even have that on my mind.”

“Alright.” A green paw prodded at the hem of the man’s coat. “So what does my being a Ghost Zone native have to do with the force of persistence that is Jasmine Fenton?”

“…articulating that is going to take me a minute.” He walked away from Bertrand, taking to pacing. It was clear he hadn’t expected to be called out so thoroughly about his partner so early into the conversation. “What—what was it like for you? When you first started interacting with entities that didn’t start out the same way you did.”

The panther sat on his haunches, his tail curling over his paws as he considered what angle of answer was being fished for. “If you’re looking for an outline of cultural differences,” he said slowly, “I don’t see what that should matter in your case, as you originally came from this world.”

The writer bit his lip. “Not quite cultural,” he replied, “that’s the wrong word for what I’m… It’s too broad. What I’m speaking of is on a much smaller scale.”

Bertrand began to suspect what might be bothering the man; it was impossible to be in the orbit of a psychologist for decades and not pick up a thing or three about how to distill an individual’s dithering. What was unusual about this situation, though, was that—it wasn’t _sympathy_, what Bertrand was feeling, but it would be self-deluding to deny the ember of kinship that had just flickered to life in his core.

“This doesn’t actually have so much to do with me being a natural ghost, does it?” he asked quietly. “You’re just looking for how to connect with someone across the gap of a fundamental difference.”

It floored him, a little bit. He’d never have predicted that he would be speaking civilly with the Ghostwriter, much less on a topic like this. It said quite a bit about many of the known relationships in the Zone that the reclusive spirit had deemed _Bertrand_ his best bet of getting whatever kind of answers he wanted.

“That’s what you had with Penelope, isn’t it?” the writer put forward tentatively. “You’re extremely similar spirit types, but I know that she used to be a human as well. There had to be things that you…clashed over.”

It was evident that the Ghostwriter had a particular type of clash with the Fenton girl in mind that he wished to speak of, but his unwillingness to directly address the topic meant that Bertrand was going to have to pry it out of him with a metaphorical crowbar. The only way to do that, however, was by doing some talking of his own, which necessitated the imparting of information that—he was now realizing—he’d never spoken aloud before. His hackles had flattened over the course of their conversation, but now so had his ears, and he wore an unconscious and troubled frown.

“We’ve had our differences,” he acknowledged, looking no longer at the man but past him. “Especially in the beginning. We spent a long time learning about one another—it was months before we came to any kind of true trust.”

“What made you want to?”

Someone else might have taken insult to the question, but in addition to feeling zero scoffing or sarcasm in it Bertrand knew that it was a fair query. In the occasionally literal ghost-eat-ghost world of the Zone trust was inadvisable at best. This was going to require some mental gumption to share.

“I don’t know how old I am,” he began. “I have no frame of reference for how long I existed prior to Penelope teaching me how the human conception of months and years works. But I know that I had a long time on my own before I ran across her and the other recently-deceased she was with at the time.”

In his peripheral vision the Ghostwriter nodded, indicating he was listening despite his expression broadcasting that he didn’t know where the smaller ghost was heading with this.

“Your core is obviously niche in a different way with that bonkers level of power,” Bertrand continued, “but you need to understand that I think Penelope’s and mine might be just as rare. I’d never met anybody like her before, and with the exception of her sister neither of us have since.”

“…you didn’t have to feel lonely anymore.”

The Ghostwriter’s murmur may as well have been a physical strike; he had to dig his claws into the dirt to keep from swaying, unused to and unprepared for his own obfuscations to be cut to the quick. “…yeah, well. Contrary to the beliefs of some, humans don’t have a monopoly on needing to feel understood.”

Seeming to sense the topic’s volatility, the writer circled them back. “What did you clash over, then? Were there… Was there the sensation that something in the partnership was missing?”

Bertrand shook out his pelt, hating the way it was prickling. It helped him mentally to remind himself to comb through the Ghostwriter’s words for what the man might be revealing of himself—he felt that something on either his or Jasmine’s side was absent, hmm? “Not so much that,” he told him. “It was the decision to turn it _into_ a partnership instead of a competition, at first, and then it was a matter of methodology. I was the more cheerfully avid one for a good while.”

The way the Ghostwriter’s eyes tightened told Bertrand that the man had successfully picked up on the implication that while Penelope hadn’t always been comfortable with murder, he had been, and the subtle reminder was as amusing as he’d hoped it would be. Just a little something to highlight that he was still dangerous, even if it wasn’t in a way that could hope to compare to the keyboard.

It was a mark of how committed he was to working things through with Jasmine that the Ghostwriter chose to stay standing right where he was rather than vanish in a justifiably self-righteous huff, even if his voice did become a mite toneless. “So you’ve always been interpersonally close, then.”

Bertrand unknowingly made a face. “Not in every sense that a human might mean it.”

The other ghost seemed to latch on to his disdain with a vigor that was almost startling. “What do you mean by that?”

“Let’s just say that while you could throw most of your ‘deadly sin’ concepts at us and make them stick, there’s one in particular that for sure won’t.”

Oddly enough this comment seemed to put something bright into the Ghostwriter’s stare, and to Bertrand’s eye it looked like some type of relief. That didn’t make much sense to him, until all at once—

“Ahh,” the panther said, his head tilting as clarity came. “You’re not the type for _that_ four-letter L-word either.”

“I’m—well—”

“No need to elaborate,” Bertrand cut him off, his tone for a wonder so mild it could have been mistaken for soothing. The writer’s expression was just too similar to the look of _absolution_ that had come over Penelope’s face when they had finally discussed the topic between one another so long ago, and the importance of that memory curbed him from further flippancy. “It seems like a rare core type isn’t the only common ground the three of us have.”

“…it would seem so.”

Bertrand moved back to his previous perch, draping himself over the rock again as he regarded the other spirit. “So, you’re…looking for advice, or what?” God, what a strange question.

The Ghostwriter had the look of a man who had never expected to get this far. “I suppose I was more just—searching out some confirmation that I wasn’t alone.” He sighed, tugging vaguely at his scarf. “Which, nice as it is, does leave me in a position that’s possibly even more awkward than this conversation has been, so advice is…warranted.”

Any other day, and any other ghost, and Bertrand would have been making a feast of this. As it was, he found himself grappling with the unfamiliar impulse of wanting to help the poor sod. Based on the particular flavor of the writer’s current distress he could tell that—“The Fenton girl doesn’t share our general disinclination.”

He just looked at his shoes. “I’ve never had to have this conversation before. It’s never come up because there really wasn’t ever anyone else, and humankind is still largely ignorant of the existence of anyone who is this way, let alone of our experiences…”

Bertrand was absolutely not going to infringe on his partner’s privacy by telling him so, but the writer was reminding him in a painful way of Penelope’s struggle in bringing up the topic with him so many years ago. The stops and starts, the bristling, the resigned assumption of impending rejection… So much guilt and confusion and fear, and all because she happened to fall into a small percentage of individuals who didn’t want something most of the rest of her former kind were taught to be obsessed with.

He fucking hated humans.

“Seems to me that it would be best if you just put it out there,” was his judgment. “It’s obviously twisting you into knots, so unless you _like_ that there’s no point prolonging it.”

“But what do I say?”

Bertrand had a knack for arranging his features into expressions that the terrestrial creatures he imitated would never be able to manage. Until he’d walked it, the earthly plane had never witnessed a panther that could be so distinctly sardonic. “You’re the wordsmith.”

“Haven’t you ever heard the expression ‘write what you know’?” the Ghostwriter almost spluttered. “How am I supposed to plan a dialogue for a situation I’ve never been in before?”

“I’ll amend a previous statement,” Bertrand said. “You aren’t twisted into knots, you’re a _Gordian knot_. And I don’t know where you’re going to find the sword to solve it for you, but I can promise that I’m not it.”

The writer blinked at him. “How do you know about…?”

“I read.” His tail was lashing rhythmically. “About a great many subjects. I know more about human history and anatomy than a vast majority of the species themselves, and can probably hold a candle to Technus when it comes to electrical engineering.”

“You, um…” The Ghostwriter was observing him askance. “You don’t look the type.”

“Of course not.” Bertrand’s eyes narrowed with a certain smugness, the air around him simmering with a dark, vicious pride. “Why do you think Penelope and I were able to operate undetected for so long?”

“…the first time you were ever caught was Casper High.” The Ghostwriter was either only just realizing this or only just remembering it. His eyes went distant, and when they refocused on the panther their irises had become chips of green flint. “You said ‘electrical engineering’ just now.”

Bertrand did not like the direction the writer’s tone had gone. “What of it?”

“It took her brother time to be honest with her about it, but he told her everything that happened at the centennial ceremony. How close she’d come to being vaporized.”

His shoulder fur was all on end; he could practically see the aura of rage that was overtaking the other ghost. “It wasn’t anything personal.”

“And that’s supposed to make it better?!”

“_Yes!_”

Even core-shakingly afraid, Bertrand was not without a surge of righteous fury of his own. His body may have begun to cower but his voice held nothing but ferocity as he faced down the Ghostwriter, hating, loathing, _despising_ the judgment shining behind those purple glasses.

“Everything on this planet takes energy from something else so that it can keep on living—only an individual with a stunted mind reviles a predator for what it hunts, and the whole damn lot of humanity are hypocrites no matter what they’re shoveling into their mouths come dinner.”

“What you do hardly seems equivalent to a wolf eating a deer.”

“And why not?”

“As far as I’m aware a wolf’s primary driving factors have never included narcissism.”

Bertrand very nearly leaped at him. “You think we do what we do out of _vanity_?”

The strangled way in which he’d spoken appeared to throw the Ghostwriter off. Some of the derision left his brow, confusion creeping into its place. “Aesthetic ‘improvement’ has always been the main goal, has it not?”

The panther _snarled_. “You don’t know a damn thing. Not a damn thing, about either of us. All you’ve ever heard is from the Fentons, and those bumbling biased fools don’t even know that there’s a difference between an obsession and a need, let alone have the ability to identify which one a ghost is consumed by.” His claws actually sank into the stone upon which he stood. “Standing there with your stable core and looking down on me, completely missing the fact that Penelope and I are always _two steps from dying_.”

The statement may as well have been a lightning bolt; the writer’s mask of confusion had become barefaced shock. “What are you talking about?”

“Whatever it is about our cores that allows us to shapeshift also drains us, whether we’re using the ability or not. The rest of the Ghost Zone floats around with hardly a care in the world and meanwhile, every second that we can’t feed, the two of us are seconds closer to withering.” Every word was an arrow, each syllable coated in the caustic venom of resentment. “So don’t you dare get all high and mighty with me about narcissism. Especially since you never gave a shit about anything we were doing until it only even _distantly_ affected _you_.”

These revelations made the Ghostwriter visibly uncomfortable, but he nonetheless stood his ground. “There’s still a difference between survival and unnecessary cruelty.”

“If you want an example of unnecessary cruelty, I suggest you speak with _dearest Jasmine_.”

It was the Ghostwriter’s turn to be less than fond of someone’s tone of voice. “Explain.”

Bertrand’s eyes were like coals: their red did not merely glow but _smolder_, hazy infernal smoke gathering and wisping out at their corners. “Do you know,” he asked, so softly, “what a Fenton Peeler is?”

It was evident that the other ghost did not, and was not sure he wanted to.

“In short, it is the realization of Jack Fenton’s favorite phrase: the ripping apart of a ghost, molecule by molecule.” Bertrand’s ill-contained wrath was beginning to affect his shape; as he was speaking he revealed a great many more teeth than should have been possible in a felid skull. “If the man had been even an iota less idiotic when he constructed it, that thing would have sliced through to Penelope’s core right there and then. And even with how it was, if we hadn’t both gotten dumped back into the Ghost Zone out of the same Thermos, if I hadn’t been _right there_, your girl would have been a murderer.”

“Anything in that situation would have been self-defense.” The Ghostwriter had had the grace to be sickened by the weapon’s ruthlessness, but remained stanch in standing by Jasmine, and it was that obstinate double standard that sent Bertrand over the edge.

“Do not say another word until you picture Jasmine flayed alive.” As he was growling he was changing, thorns erupting along the ridge of his spine and causing rivers of ectoplasm that hissed and boiled at his feet. “Do not _speak_ to me again until you’ve thought about holding the one you love in your arms while she can barely breathe, and spending more than a fortnight thinking that at any moment she’s going to slip away from you. That there won’t be anything that you can do about it even though you’ve been awake for weeks and spending every moment of it trying to make her better.”

He was revealing far more than he otherwise would have but at that moment Bertrand did not care. The Ghostwriter had kicked a feral hound, and by god he was going to bite.

“Now picture her starting to recover, but never quite all the way, and both of you knowing it. _And then imagine that the person who did that to her now comes around to bother her with fair regularity_. And every time it takes everything in you, but you leave them to it because against every wager imaginable she doesn’t want to kill them.” He was shaking, for multiple reasons. “You think about all of those things, Johnathan Feldman, and then you _get down from your fucking high horse_, because it has _shit_ for a _saddle_.”

The other ghost seemed at a loss for words, which suited Bertrand just fine. He didn’t have much further to sling at him; the flashfire of his rage had burnt itself through and with it his remaining energy. The eldritch aspects of his form receded, limbs and thorns falling away one by one until he was in his most base shape, and he sat—collapsed, almost—back against the rock.

_I shouldn’t have done that._

His temper had always been a failing. Despite decades of working on it he still couldn’t help high emotion triggering an uncontrolled shift, and now he was paying the price. He’d been running close to empty even before the conversation had begun. Now, the wretched trembling he could feel overtaking his core told him that he was dangerously close to the type of withering he’d so lately spoken of.

The Ghostwriter finally said something, his voice quiet. “I didn’t know.”

“…yeah, well.” If he’d had lungs Bertrand’s breathing would have been labored. “You could probably fill your whole library with things that you don’t know.”

“My archives are far more extensive than they appear—”

“I know what the inside looks like, windows are a thing.” Bertrand sighed. What did the humans call it? Bone-tired? He lacked a skeletal structure at the moment but it was still apt. “Look, I helped you with your question. Do you mind just giving me some space, now?”

“I’m—” He cut himself off from whatever he was going to say, something unidentifiable in his eyes as he looked at the other ghost. He tugged on his scarf again for a few moments in an apparent attempt to marshal his thoughts. “You didn’t give me much to go on.”

“How am I supposed to? Our situations aren’t equivalent, for a start.” He blinked blearily at the writer. “You’re just going to have to talk to her.”

“I’m still dubious at that approach, to be honest.”

“Dubious? Or anxious?” Emotionally he’d circled all the way back around to a kind of patience, if an exasperated one. “There’s a difference between pragmatism and _procrastination_, Ghostwriter.”

That brought the man up short. His mouth opened and closed several times, and no sound came out.

“Maybe have the rest of this internal crisis back at your own lair?” Bertrand suggested, his tone for a wonder not unkind. “I’m sure you can see I need to rest, and I’m equally sure that you don’t want to be here when Penelope comes looking for me.”

“…no. No, I should think I wouldn’t.” He spent a few further seconds worrying at his lip with his teeth, and then gave a kind of cough. “You’ve been…informative.”

“You’re welcome.” Even in a severely weakened state he could always summon the smarm for a smile.

The Ghostwriter finally drifted away, and when he had fully gone Bertrand allowed himself to drift too. Sleep was second-best to feeding properly, but with the state he was in it was the best he was going to be able to manage, at least until Jasmine stopped pestering his partner. In any case he had the comfort of knowing that they were a full city over from Amity Park, and was therefore unlikely to be ambushed by any ghost hunters while he was still out of sorts. Getting back out of the Zone wouldn’t be an insurmountable issue—not with all the natural portals he knew about—but it would still be an inconvenience.

Bertrand floated pleasantly in memories of what Penelope’s demeanor had been like when he’d first taken her through a rift back to the Real World. Like all ghosts he’d had a lair back in the Zone, but he’d never quite called it home—home, for him, had at that point begun to mean _‘wherever Penelope was’_. She however had indicated a longing for the earthly plane despite an affinity for the Zone, and it had sent quivers of delight all through his core to watch the way her face lit up in the glow of the moon.

“What’s got _you_ all sentimental?”

The words yanked him back into consciousness, and he pouted up at their source when she punctuated them with a nudge of her shoe. “Hey, I’m allowed to wax rhapsodical if I want to.”

“That’s not even a word.”

Bertrand didn’t have the energy for any more than giving a vague sort of ‘nyeh’, which Penelope took note of.

“You don’t look well,” she assessed, lowering her sunglasses to rake him over with a critical eye. “Who’d you manage to piss off?”

“The Ghostwriter.”

Penelope initially scoffed, but her stare became saucer-like when his deadpan expression told her that he wasn’t being facetious. “…when we get back to the hotel you’re telling me that story.”

He’d been planning on that anyway but mumbled agreement for her benefit. When he reached out his hands she took them in hers, and with a flash of light their energies mingled and arced over the tree line, flying as a single ectoplasmic bolt back towards the cityscape.


End file.
